Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Carry him off in a patent coffin: body snatching in the eighteenth century

Occasionally Dan turned the pages of his
newspaper. Someone was advertising a new design of coffin, secure enough to
keep out body snatchers. Good luck with that, he thought.

The Butcher’s Block: A Dan Foster
Mystery

I
recently spent an afternoon in Frenchay, near Bristol, visiting the Frenchay Unitarian Chapel.
The Chapel dates from the seventeenth century and has several interesting features.
These include a door said to have been specially designed to allow women
wearing crinolines under their skirts to enter the building, and a weathervane which
is thought to commemorate the appearance of Halley’s Comet in 1759.

Frenchay Unitarian Chapel

I’d gone
in search of something more prosaic: the Body Snatchers' Stone. In the
forthcoming Dan Foster Mystery, The
Butcher’s Block, Dan is drawn into the grisly world of body snatching, which
quickly leads him into a much bigger and more dangerous criminal conspiracy. Body
snatching was a common crime in the eighteenth century, as the demand for human
bodies for medical training increased. Teaching hospitals and private medical
schools were prepared to pay for cadavers for dissection by their students, and
no questions asked about where the bodies came from.

The
bodies were disinterred from graveyards, especially the graves of poor people
who could not afford good-quality coffins and might in addition be buried in
shallow mass graves. These were often left open until they were full, making
them easy for grave robbers to access. Workhouses were another source of corpses.
There were even cases where body snatchers broke into houses and took a body before
it had been buried. Grave-robbing gangs might have an elaborate system of spies
who kept their ears open for news of a recent death, or hung around graveyards
to watch funerals. They might bribe sextons and night watchmen to gain access
to the graves. The corpses of poor patients who died in hospital might also end
up on the dissection slab, whether or not they had willed it or their relatives
consented to it.

The Graveyard, Frenchay Unitarian Chapel

Body snatching
was a crime that filled most people with horror. In Bristol in 1761 a collier’s
son was dissected in the Infirmary. When his father opened the coffin and
discovered that his son’s head was missing he went to the surgeon’s home and
threatened him until the head was restored. In Carlisle friends of a man who
had been hanged and dissected shot one of the doctors involved. In Cambridge in
1830 two arrested body snatchers were attacked by a furious mob while being
escorted to prison.

Those who
could afford it took steps to protect their corpses. Patent coffins, such as
the ones Dan reads about, were available to those who had the money. They might
be lined with lead and boast a system of locks and bars designed to baffle the would-be
grave robber, or have no external hinges or screws. Some were wrapped in chains
or iron bands, or consisted of double or triple shells around a lead interior.

Cheaper
ploys included covering the body in quick lime to hasten decay and render it unusable.
Many graveyards hired night watchmen to guard the burial grounds. In The Butcher’s Block Dan sees such a
watchman dozing in his sentry box at a church in Southwark.

The mort safe
was a Scottish invention. It consisted of an iron cage which was placed around
the freshly occupied grave and left for several weeks. By then the corpse would
have decayed beyond the point at which it was useful to the surgeons, and the
cage would be removed and hired out to another grave. Another popular method in
Scotland was to lock corpses in stone burial vaults and bury them after some
weeks had passed. Elsewhere, cruder methods included placing mantraps in
graveyards. One man even put a mine in his daughter’s grave.

Is this the Body Snatchers' Stone?

Another
deterrent was a body snatcher’s stone, a great stone slab which was winched
into place on top of a fresh grave and left for several weeks. The Body
Snatchers' Stone in Frenchay is such a device. I had read a description of it:
a pennant stone slab with no markings, so I went to see if could find it. I did
find a stone slab marked only with lines that did not look as if they had ever
been lettering. Is this the Body Snatchers’ Stone? If not, where is it? If anyone
can tell me, I’d love to hear from you!

Close up of the stone

Incidentally,
the title of this piece is taken from Southey’s poem The Surgeon’s Warning. A surgeon who has dissected many stolen
cadavers begs his friends to make sure that when he is buried, grave robbers
cannot steal his corpse for the same treatment. He directs that he is to be interred
in a patent coffin lined with lead and soldered shut, and he leaves money to
pay for night watchmen who will be paid an extra reward if they shoot a
“resurrection man”, as grave robbers
were known. Read the poem to find out if his elaborate precautions save him
from the poetic justice he so richly deserves!

The
next Dan Foster Mystery, The Butcher’s
Block, will be published in June (paperback and ebook).

And
look out for the Dan Foster ebook novella, The
Fatal Coin, which will be published in May.

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About Me

I live in Bristol and I write historical fiction and non-fiction. In 2006 I completed an MA in English Literature with the Open University, specialising in eighteenth century literature.
My historical novels are set in the eighteenth century. To date they are: To The Fair Land (2012); and the Dan Foster Mystery Series comprising Bloodie Bones (2015), The Fatal Coin (2017) and The Butcher’s Block (2017). Bloodie Bones was a winner of the Historical Novel Society Indie Award 2016 and a semi-finalist for the M M Bennetts Historical Fiction Award 2016.
The Bristol Suffragettes (non-fiction), a history of the suffragette campaign in Bristol and the south west which includes a fold-out map and walk, was published in 2013.